Data - will you be my Valentine?

All good relationships are built on trust and the most trustworthy part of your business is its data.

Your company generates data about customers, sales, staff performance and inventory records daily. Having the data is just the beginning. Extracting value from it on-the-fly, company-wide on an ad hoc basis is the end- game. And it's process we think you'll fall in love with.

According to inc.com, analyzing data can help transform performance, boost revenue, increase profits and improve customer satisfaction and retention. So it may very well be your most valuable asset.

In this blog, we will review how analyzing your data can be done quickly and easily with industry leading business intelligence (BI) software. We will discuss the benefits of BI and how it can help you make better business decisions.

Business leaders often rely on experience and ‘gut-feel’ to make important decisions. While it’s good to trust your instincts, it’s even more important to know how to use company data to make ‘fact-based’ decisions and reduce the margin for human error.

Fact-based decision making helps companies to adjust to changes in their industry. A good BI solution makes this easy and available to anyone, not just IT experts.

Increase sales

BI has improved profit margins for thousands of retail, manufacturing and distribution companies by highlighting where sales are performing well and where they can be improved.

Tracking sales data by customer can reveal trends and present opportunities to better position your company for growth.

By understanding your customers’ buying behavior, you will be able to spoon feed opportunities to your sales team. This will help sales find ways to increase profit and build loyalty within an existing customer base having more meaningful conversations during customer visits.

Improve inventory management

Carrying too much stock can be as damaging to your bottom line as carrying too little. BI makes it easy to track inventory levels by branch, store, or your distribution centers and presents a consolidated view of your data to help refine stock management.

Effective inventory management is crucial for loyal and repeat custom. A promise to hold or deliver products within a certain timeframe plays a key role in securing sales. Failure to do so in many sectors leads to customers going elsewhere for immediate fulfilment.

Streamline financial management

Simplify your financial data analysis with BI. Financial statements are usually presented as fixed reports that offer no room for analysis. The right BI solution can blend financial statements with real-time data analytics to improve revenue and expenditure management.

Profit and loss (P&L), balance sheets and cash flow can be analyzed using an analysis grid and reported in effective dashboards, graphs and charts to better manage your company’s financial health.

BI can also help you solve the challenge of managing rebates. What was once a chaotic process is now made easy. Eliminate painful spreadsheets and enjoy a consolidated view of rebates payable, receivable or both.

Free up the IT department

One of the best features of a good BI solution is that it’s easy to use. Anyone can create their own reports and drill down to find out exactly what they need. It's simple to understand, even for non-technical people.

This is a big advantage for your IT department that is typically burdened with running complex reports. And as more data is available to companies and competitors take advantage of it, IT departments are under more pressure to run more and faster reports.

With self-service BI, employees are in control of their data. Good BI solutions also have plenty of training resources available, which means IT spend less time training employees.

Trust Phocas software with your data

Phocas business intelligence simplifies the way businesses make critical decisions by integrating data from your ERP, CRM, spreadsheets, or other data sources in a simple-to-use solution that is easy to understand, and designed for anyone in your company to use.

The leading BI solution presents data in a live analysis grid that you can drill into based on the questions you ask, slicing and dicing to get the answers you need.

Phocas Software helps thousands of manufacturing, distribution and retail customers around the world use data to identify opportunities, grow profits and increase efficiencies. It’s an intuitive, user-friendly solution for all skill levels that becomes your single source of truth.